I love the scrappy mockery of Jesus and Mo. Freedom of speech
includes the freedom to mock any person, any thing, any activity, and
any belief -- and J&M stands up for this unflinchingly Richard Stallman

On the contrary, the fact that the Catholic Church has survived two thousand years of being run by dimwits and crooks is the best possible evidence of its divine origin and sustenance. Any merely human organization would have collapsed long ago. (I forget who said this.)

I don’t think it has been 2000 years – the early centuries saw many sects of xtian beleivers

and from whenever it did settle down into just the Catholic Church – kind of like the last guppy in the tank – the international corporation that it is now would bear very little resemblance to their origin century

Probably why they took out the Knights Templar – they were better organized as the first multi-national corporation

On Irish radio interview yesterday, re. his knowledge of child abuse by one of his priests when he was a bishop, Cardinal SeÃ¡n Brady said (drink up now),”You CAN’T judge acts of 35 years ago by today’s standards.”
This from an organisation that judges the acts of today by standards from 2000 years ago.
SSSPOIIIING!!!!!!!

Since everything that happens MUST be God’s Will (TM) and the RCC is the One True Church (TM), everything that happens in the One True Church (TM) MUST be God’s Will (TM).
That’s one of them there logical silojisms. Right? Right?
Hello? Is this thing on?

@ Shaughn Light is electro-magnetic wave so on another side of sun there are electro magnetic-waves but no light because it is human name for electro-magnetic waves that we can perceive with eyes. If there are no eyes – there are no light.

Methinks light is a real and direct experience, Nina. Try looking in the sun.
And I doubt very much that the magnetism on a tape or in a chip or the pattern laser burned in a CD perceived although it is by a recording device, is sound.

Whatever it is there is before you experience it, you can only name it after your sensory experience of it. And Occams razor requires to take the least amount of propositions – so a tree falling makes noise, at the other side of the sun there is light, regardless anyone perceives it or not. Perception of the phenomenon is perception, not the phenomenon itself.

By the way, applying Occam’ Razor the inevitable conclusion must be that god (Al, Jay, whoever) is a superfluous hypothesis.

Those people who still feel able to defend the Catholic Church despite everything that has occured are truly fascinating. It is not even possible to claim that although the RCC has a really shitty history of corruption, torture, mass murder, genocide, forced conversion, grand theft, obscurantism and sexual depravity, while at the same time falsely claiming the moral highground and pompously lecturing everyone else on how they should live, that that evil stuff is all in the past.

The Catholic Church was in the past, and remains in modern times, the most evil organisation that has ever existed, by a collossal margin, no other institution, either religious or secular, comes within a thousand miles of being as bad.

@John Cowan. The idea of a Christian Church ruled by sinners but protected by God is shown by Boccaccio (Decameron, I, 2, see http://www.atuttascuola.it/decamerone/g_01/1_02.htm) in 13th Century. Curiously enough, this idea is akin to an anomistic view, according to which the ‘unconditionally saved’ can indulge in any behaviour because God has chosen to save them after all.

@ John Moore – I think the universe and things in it are pretty indifferent to mere humans, we don’t make things exist or real by our presence.

I guess I didn’t express my thought fully, because you are extrapolating what I said too far.

We know light exists because it allows us to see things around us. But those things still exist in the dark.

The sun itself is the explosions, we see a corona and then there’s blackness around the sun because there’s nothing for light to reflect off of.

We can see fire and we see things in a flickering illumination around the fire, but we don’t see a beam of light from the fire to the trees or people around the fire – light is invisible to us until it’s reflected off of something.

if light itself were visible, then it would be hard to see other things on the other side of the light

@ nina you are not wrong per se. You do seem to understand some of what you speak. Sound exists without an “ear” to hear because the atmosphere is what propagates the wave. Light needs no medium as it is both characteristics of waves and beams. We see things that reflect specific wavelengths which give us colors. Funny thing is humans only perceive about 5% of the total spectrum of energies. Which always leads me to be extremely humble about our ability to understand things totally.

Actually, it is just a pseudo-philosophical riddle and only a matter of definitions, not a matter of being right or wrong, Nina.

If, like most people do, you define ‘sound’ as a wave of varying pressure propagating through matter, and the ‘hearing’ perception as transformation of pressure into electric nerve and brain activity, then you say: sound exists without anyone hearing it. If on the other hand you define ‘sound’ as the experienced product of hearing instead of the wave – then there is no sound when it is not heard.

@ Daoloth I assume you are referring to the monitor I am using to read this website with. It only produces pixels in the red blue green spectrum which as best I know we have been able to see all along. The varying hues produced provide the spectrum of visible colors. We have created prosthetics to perceive other wavelengths like x-rays, cosmic waves, microwaves, uv waves (t.v), radio waves, etc. Clever little buggers aren’t we……

nina: The later centuries have had a lot of sects too. As for the Knights Templar, it was the King of France who destroyed them, not the Church.

Stonyground: I doubt that competitions for Maximum Evilness have much merit. The Church has never killed people en masse in the style of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, but it has had much longer to act. And I am by no means one of its defenders, any more than I defend dictators.

Dear Author, this strip is utterly wonderful. (Just in case anyone hasn’t mentioned it lately). We are greatly in your debt for such fine comedy (though doubtless you’d admit the three big religions give you consistently top quality raw material).

Is it time for J&M to run as a print column too, in Private Eye perhaps ? Or might they not have the nerve… Ah – sorry, I forgot that Mr Hislop is a follower of the Celestial Teapot isn’t he, so that’s a non-starter I suppose…

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